Borges and La Bibliothèque des Mots

While most of the la Bibliothèque des Mots  is comprised of fiction books, a quarter of the books are merely for reference. I admit I will buy almost any sort of reference book if I think it might contain a little tidbit of information that will contribute to my writing. I like to think of my library as something Jorge Luis Borges would approve of and considering the number of books I have bought solely because they were somewhere mentioned in his works, he probably would.

To get you started on building a library Borges would approve of, here's a short list of books mentioned in Borges work that no library would be complete without:

1. Sir Richard Burton's 16 volumes of The Arabian Nights or "Alf-layla wa-layla" in Arabic.
I own the edition printed by the Burton Club in 1950 that was limited to 1,000 printings. It's quite expensive, but can be found on ABEbooks. The version I own is in 16 volumes, but the original 1885 printing is 17 volumes. Try to stay away from Lady Burton's edition however as it was strictly for "ladies" and has had all the juicy bits edited out.

And no, I have not read all 16 volumes because well obviously Scheherazade, the legendary Persian queen and storyteller of The Arabian Nights is a far better woman than me.

2. The Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao Hsueh-Chin (also known as A Dream of Red Mansions)
Borges called this book "an almost infinite novel". It contains 421 characters; 189 of whom are woman, and 232 men. The Dream of Pao-Yu prefigures that chapter in Lewis Carroll where Alice dreams of the Red King who is dreaming her except that Carroll's dream is a metaphysical fantasy, Pao-Yu's is charged with sadness, despair, and a deep irreality.  If that doesn't convince you there is also a chapter on wanking.

3. The Odyssey, Homer
I have many copies of the Odyssey, but my favourite translation of Homer's work thus far is Lattimore's. I also own Fagles' translation, which is considered more contemporary but no less brilliant. If you'd like to know what you should look for when selecting a translation of The Odyssey or The Illiad, this is a very helpful link: On Translating Homer.

Borges liked Homer's adjectives such as "the wine dark sea", "the nourishing earth", "damp waves". In Borges' The Total Library there is an essay called "The Homeric Versions", where Borges discusses the translations and says that "thus a good film seen a second time seems even better". So basically Borges is saying you need to read Homer over and over again and which translation might not matter. However I personally implore you to stay away from Lamb's translation unless you like a serious scholarly challenge.

4. The Divine Comedy, Dante Aligheri
No library - Borges' or otherwise - would be complete without The Divine Comedy. Borges praised the Dent & Sons edition originally printed in 1901, whose three volumes Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso have Italian on one page and the English translation on the other. Borges read The Divine Comedy for the first time when he was 35, while taking the street cars to and from his job at the library. The interesting little bit about this is Borges read the English page while he read Inferno and by the time he started reading Purgatorio he was reading in English. "At the moment when Dante is abandoned by Virgil and finds himself alone and calls out to him at that moment I felt I could read the Italian text directly." So yes, Hell was English and Italian purgatory, but don't take it personally because Borges was a huge Anglophile (like Madame Mimi).

5. Sweet's The Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse
Read towards the end of his life, Sweet's Anglo-Saxon reader helped Borges to rediscover his ancestry as Borges grandmother was of English descent. Borges said about The Anglo-Saxon Reader; "I thought I have lost the visible world (Borges went blind) but now I'm going to recover another".

6. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey
Borges claimed that, "I owed to de Quincey to whom my debt is vast that to point out only one part of it may appear to repudate or silence the others". 

If you need further convincing Confessions of an English Opium Eater was also a big source of inspiration to Yves Saint Laurent, who believed that eating hashish helped him to be a better createur. In fact, in my humble opinion Yves Saint Laurent may be the greatest designer the world has ever known. Though drugs contributed to his poor health, his collections imply that his inspiration was not limited to hash eating, even if he did name his most famous perfume "Opium".

7. Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg was a genius who wrote in Latin and believed that one could visit Heaven and Hell as if one were taking a day trip. He also believed he could talk to angels (I think Philip Pullman took some inspiration from Swedenborg for his trilogy "His Dark Materials", but when I spoke to Pullman I was so in awe of him that I forgot to ask, will post the question to his blog, and if he responds update in the comments section.)

Borges liked Swedenborg for his crazy ideas, for example "from a symbollic reading of the Bible he [Swedenborg] went on to do a symbollic reading of the universe." Borges even wrote a poem about Swedenborg.

Taller than the others, this man
Walked among them, at a distance,
Now and then calling the angels
By their secret names. He would see
That which earthly eyes do not see:
The fierce geometry, the crystal
Labyrinth of God and the sordid
Milling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hell too
Are in your soul, with all their myths;
He knew, like the Greek, that the days
Of time are Eternity's mirrors.
In unadorned Latin he went on listing
The unconditional Last Things.

8. The 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
There are two celebrated editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the 9th and the 11th. The 11th is the last edition prior to the Encyclopedia Britannica transitionning to an American publication and carries over a lot of the text found in the 9th, but was the first to include an index. Many noted scholars contributed to both editions including Bertrand Russell, Edmund Gosse, and William Michael Rossetti.  While most of the information would be now outdated, so not suitable for scholarly purposes, it was for Borges a very important set of books.

9. Mathematics and the Imagination, Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
Highly considered to be the first book to explain the complex aspects of mathematics to the layperson, it is a truly fascinating book even for someone who has studied advanced mathematics there are plenty of things one has never heard of and is written to enchant. Yes, Madame Mimi finds mathematics enchanting. You might too after checking out this book.

10. Ulysses, James Joyce
Borges was the frst traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot the shores of Ulysses, a "lush wilderness". Borges said of Joyce, "Joyce is less of a man of letters than a literature and incredibly he is a literature within the compass of a single volume".

Still, considering there are two copies on the shelf (and one Bodley Head edition recently given away to a friend) and two companion books to Ulysses such as The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires and Ulysses by Stuart Glibert that Joyce himself helped write, I have not made it past the first twenty pages and for this I feel a certain amount of shame. I've often said I should lock myself in a room until I finished it, but this has yet to happen.

I asked a friend, who first read Ulysses when he was 22, "One read Ulysses", he responded "for the same reason you climb mountains. It's a slog (UK English meaning task, drag), but it's rewarding [to read Ulysses] and funny. It's actually hilarious in parts."

He offered me the example of "the bit where he hangs off a ledge by his eyelids", which is pretty much the way I felt just reading those 20 pages.

Books of Jorge Luis Borges that no library would be complete without:

1. The Total Library
2. Fictions
3. The Book of Fantasy
4. Book of Imaginary Beings
5. The Aleph
6. Universal History of Infamy
7. Extraordinary Tales

While all of Borges' work is worth a look, one book in particular is my favourite and that is The Book of Fantasy. The Wiki page for this book says that Extraordinary Tales is a translation of The Book of Fantasy, but upon closer examination that is inaccurate. I will do some more research into the claim and see what I can find and update through the comments section.

Perhaps if you read a few books that Borges loved and books that he wrote you will better understand the quote I scratched in pencil on the underside of one of the pieces of wood used to build the shelves for La Bibliothèque des Mots.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

And for those of you for whom I built this "Paradise", because the books were never just for me but for all my friends, I will never, ever tell you where this inscription is because it's the one part of Paradise that is just for me.